The future of HENkaku: what’s next for PS Vita hacks?

HENkaku was released a bit more than 2 months ago and resuscitated the PS Vita scene. After weeks of frenzy and several releases, we’re now entering a bit quieter phase. Still a steady amount of cool releases, but the initial passion is now leaving room for what I hope is going to be long lasting love.

So what can we expect for PS Vita hacks in the mid to long term future?

Improved emulators

The PS vita impressed us with a collection of emulators running almost out of the box as soon as Henkaku was released. We’ve been seeing steady improvements on these emulators (Retroarch started adding dynarec support recently, meaning more speed improvements), and we should expect them to easily top what was doable on the PSP.

Emulators on the PS Vita dramatically extend the library of games on the device, and I would expect this to keep being one of the main targets for people hacking their PS Vita.

There’s also the expectation to see more and more emulated systems supported, in particular through Retroarch.

More Homebrews

We’re driving the GekiHEN contest with a few other sites of the Vita scene. It runs through January, so you still have lots of time to work on your homebrew and submit your entry.

My personal motivation as a sponsor of this event is to give people motivation to write more homebrews and keep the scene alive. The cash prizes are a forcing factor to ensure we’ll see cool homebrew show up, and avoid people “calling it a day” once we only have emulators.

Custom Firmware?

Do we need a “custom firmware” on the PS Vita? I’d say that this would be the next cool thing to explore: an all-in-one solution to add features to HENkaku. Maybe better integrated support of custom themes, support for plugins in every mode of the Vita, better music or video players, a cool integrated options menu that would include all of the registry hacks and more… Most of that could be made available through homebrew, but I think a fully integrated solution would be pretty cool.

Cheaper Memory Cards?

from @RichDevX

There’s been ongoing hardware work to try and reverse engineer the PS Vita memory cards. The sony proprietary cards are overpriced, and everyone’s looking forward to the possibility to use nano SD cards instead of the Vita memory sticks.

Although that work is not directly related to software hacks such as HENkaku, there’s a possibility that having access to the OS through HENkaku could help making progress on these. There might after all be ways to hack the firmware at runtime in order to accept some different (less “secure”) memory cards?

PS vita Emulator

Work on a PS Vita emulator would be to me the next big step in the Vita Hacking process. With full access to the system, it is my understanding that there should now be possibilities to fully reverse engineer the system, which typically is done by the people trying to write an emulator.

I’m honestly surprised to not have seen several teams working on this by now, although I have to assume this is happening but most serious teams are probably keeping their work under wraps until they have something useful. It might take years, as console systems are becoming way more complex than they used to be. There’s also the grey legal are in which such projects evolve, which might be impacting the enthusiasm of some hackers.

as long as users as protected from unnecessary access from malicious homebrews automatically and not just via warning that can still be skip users will be wary of new homebrews and might affect homebrew development.

do normal user really need access to those partition and extra permission just play homebrew or their pirated games? cant we have a normal Henkaku with limited access and a dev denkaku with extra access mush like rebug and normal cfw

cheap storage is what most people would look for imo. i have a 64 gb its ore then enough but not everyone wants to spend that kind of money just for storage. A cfw would be cool but not really necessary as henkaku is fine by me the way it is. what would be really cool is a memorycard to usb adapter for a hdd on the pstv!

Bluetoth keyboard and mouase contability in everything, even apps and games! And a Notepad++ editor for the psvita so you can programm lua scripts without the hassle to ftp the data around…vitashell only allow to use the keyboard when pressed (x)

Yes I have read somewhere that its impossible because its not connected in the right way on the circuit board. so i think without hardware mod no way. But hey that would be the easiest if it could be done

I’m not sure about this… voltage polarity is correct (otherwise it could not recharge joypads)

The only other supported function is updating the firware from USB… if it can read and install firmware data why could it NOT read other data from USB? accessing the USB (even as a read only memory) would be a cheap and practical solution to expensive memory stick… moreover if some sort of media player would arise we would have a small little box packed with functions…

I have no problem paying for your games, but jeez Sony, the price of your memcards suck. I understand the need to make them hard to reverse, but I feel saves could’ve been handled by on cart storage including anticipated DLC, for everything, encrypted sdcard, maybe even per psv encryption, but damn those Vita memcards

I meant port it to 3.18 of course if the ecfw ever surfaces for 3.60 then it might be time to update. 3.18 has everything I want except the ability to play all my newer Vita games. But maybe that is no longer an issue with whitelist. (I assume it works on 3.18?)

Let’s get real, do you honestly believe people will honestly have a reason to buy the Vita if there is an emulator? Please don’t put that into place. It’ll kill the Vita and you know it. We are trying to keep the vita the alive, not kill it. They made a PSP emulator because PSP merely had its time.The Vita has POTENTIAL. Don’t kill the Vita, before it is truly born!

If someone wants to really do something ***HOW ABOUT*** we all try go revive the lost Dreamcast Emulator FOR PSP that was closed source and forgotten 9 years ago!!! Almost ten!!! THAT WILL MAKE A CHANGE! THAT, WILL TEST THE TRUE LIMITS OF THE PSP!!! We say we are done with PSP, but truly we are not. And to prove it, we are literally using the Vita’s PSP emulator, just to get Emulators to work?! Let’s be real now?!

Are we? The things being run on Henkaku are *native* Vita apps, not things run on the PSP emulator. It used to be that way before Henkaku, of course.

In fact, they’ve only just recently hacked the PSP Emulator, and that function isn’t even in current builds yet. So how can we be ‘literally using the Vita’s PSP emulator, just to get Emulators to work/?

Ideas that i propose: 1 – loading games via usb pen drive, but vita must have otg usb 2 – streaming video from pc to vita via usb to use vita like a cheap vr screen to use with google card board (vita has gyroscope

Straight up piracy is the only thing that will bring it back from the grave.Emulators are a waste of time you can play all those emulators on a pc. Not a lot of noteworthy homebrew games have been made either. Nothing too impressive

Don’t expect an otg usb cable… I believe the hidden port is directly connected to the battery. So again, don’t expect anything being done with it. I highly doubt the Vita is powerful for PS2 emulation…

even since it came to my knowlegde that the team Cobra was working on some new hardware for the PS Vita, I expected it to be a competitor for the proprietary one. A faster, more reliable (seriously, I’m SICK AND TIRED of that C2-12828-1 error message popping up in the middle of my Helldivers gameplay every so often, it’s ANNOYING as heck!) and not-so-expensive-as-the-original memory card. Sony could’ve worked harder to bring better stability fixes to it, but do you seriously think they’ve bothered at least once to do that? No, they didn’t. I support another memory card for the Vita, even if that requires me to get a 3.60-based handheld.

This is just the photographer in me, but i think it would be cool to have some sort of photo editor on the vita that would include CR2, RAW, and others. unless there already is, in which case I shall commence the hunt for it!

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